Manage your subscription

In hot water

By Justin Mullins

THE sea around Antarctica is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world’s
oceans, raising fears of a catastrophe in the region. “If the Southern Ocean is
warming that quickly, the consequences are likely to be profound,” says Mike
Meredith, an oceanographer at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge.

Traditionally, the Antarctic’s Southern Ocean has always been difficult to
study because of its isolation and severe weather. “It’s a miserable place to go
to sea,” says Sarah Gille, from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San
Diego, who has come up with the first clear …